Nuwe Raises €100K Pre-seed Investment Round from Think Bigger Capital

Looking for ways to improve your software development skills and programing performance? Most developers know that there’s a huge difference between writing code and becoming an accomplished programmer. At Nuwe, developers go from good to outstandingly capable, upgrading not only their problem-solving abilities but also their overall cognitive capacity. Nuwe is currently raising their €100K pre-seed round from Demium’s partner fund, Think Bigger Capital, proving even more so how their dedication, expertise and passion turn developers into rockstar engineers.

Q: Tell us about Nuwe

Nuwe is a startup which is disrupting the way developers improve their skills and get hired, thanks to its gamified challenge-based platform. At Nuwe, developers participate in weekly challenges, coding leagues and hackathons, which are one-weekend events where they have to develop different challenges, both individually and in teams, focused on different technologies and roles, such as web development, data science, etc. With all of this they get to validate both hard and soft skills of the participants while they are having fun meeting other developers with the same interests. Then, companies can hire already validated talents with just “one-click” which makes processes much shorter and cheaper, unlike processes done the conventional way, They are also able to sell themselves as a dev-friendly company.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the founding team. How come you started in Demium and how has the incubation programme experience been so far?

We are three young Aerospace Engineers (24 y.o.) with a clear entrepreneurial ambitious mindset, and with experience in software and business development, UX/UI design and product management. We studied together and we decided to start another project in September 2019, which at the beginning pertained to another market but because of the Covid crisis we had to change our niche. In September 2020, after noticing IT hiring is a strong pain for tech companies we decided to move forward with this idea. In December 2020, we met with Bruno and Rapha at Demium Barcelona thanks to a friend of Edgar’s, CEO and co-founder, who was in a startup and put us in touch with them. In January 2021 we officially joined Demium in the accelerator program. The experience so far has been delightful, we have had the opportunity to meet highly talented mentors, advisors and entrepreneurs.

Q: What was it like raising a round for the first time?

The experience has been really exciting, but also quite tough and we were pretty nervous, but at the end of the day we were confident that we had a winning project and a solid team to raise the round. The moment they let you know you finally got the investment is thrilling, as all the hard work finally pays off. Nonetheless, this is also the moment you realize that your A-game should be on, and you need to start getting your head together because there’s still a long way to go.

Q: What will you focus your initial funding on?

The funding will be focused on our go-to-market strategy, which includes mainly marketing and software development. We have to be ready to iterate in our strategy and so we have to be really careful not to spend too much too fast.

Q: What role did Demium play in this first investment round?

Demium mentors in Barcelona helped us quite a lot with the financials, the business plan and getting our pitch deck ready for the investment round. Also, they gave us countless recommendations and advice for first-time founders like ourselves in order to secure our pre-seed round.

Q: What’s next for Nuwe?

We’re thinking of starting a five-week Summer Coding League. It will be the biggest event ever organized for Spanish-speaking countries. The developers will be testing their skills individually and in groups, in areas like web development, mobile development and data science. The group project will be a close collaboration with the “Muévete Por Los Que No Pueden” NGO that promotes rare diseases as a priority in global health, focusing in particular on those conditions suffered by 5 out of 10,000 people. This NGO hosts sport events covered by social media, using a very basic landing page. The idea behind the group project is to develop an application that plans and manages events online. There will be two individual challenges every week for all modalities. By the end of the hackathon event, the ranking is posted and prizes will be awarded.

Q: What have you been up to?

We organized a two-phase hackathon a few days ago at the Barcelona Digital Talent Event and MWC. The first one was online where we had around 500 attendees. We shortlisted 16 people for the finals that were held during the Mobile World Congress 2021, in Barcelona. Our 100m2 stand was visited by all participants who were given the chance to network and have mentorship sessions on-site. Mentors like CaixaBank chose the eight-member winning group at the end of the hackathon event.